Time for Obama to rethink Washington's mild-mannered stance toward China

One critical point overlooked in the recent 9/11 commentary is the shift in the US-China relationship that was emerging in 2001 until it was aborted by the September 11 terrorist attacks.

The Bush administration was in the process of asserting a stronger deterrent stance against potential Chinese aggression directed at democratic Taiwan. But after 9/11, Washington hurried to count China among its allies in the "war on terror." The administration reverted to the traditional conciliatory approach to China as a quasi “strategic partner” and “responsible stakeholder.” That policy, largely continued by the Obama administration, has colored Sino-US relations for the worse ever since – on Taiwan, human rights, trade practices, currency manipulation, and other issues.

As the United States begins the next post-9/11 decade and Beijing brandishes what Henry Kissinger now calls its “triumphalist” assertiveness, Washington will have to rethink that relationship.

The year 2001 began with the inauguration of President George W. Bush who, like all presidents since Nixon, pledged a reset of America’s relations with the Chinese Communist regime.

His immediate predecessor, Bill Clinton, who had criticized the first President Bush for “coddling the butchers of Beijing” after the Tiananmen Square massacre, went through his own turbulent first term with China. In the midst of it, Clinton’s leading Asia diplomat responded to a direct question from the Chinese military on how Washington would react if China attacked Taiwan. His answer – “it would depend on the circumstances” – became the mantra for the doctrine of “strategic ambiguity” through subsequent administrations.

After Bush II took office, however, Beijing presented him with an early test of his own resolve in the face of China’s increasing assertiveness in the region. On April 1, 2001, a Chinese jet fighter pilot aggressively tracked and harassed a lumbering US reconnaissance aircraft, clipping the EP-3’s wing, destroying the Chinese plane and killing the pilot, and forcing the US plane to make an emergency landing on China’s Hainan Island. Beijing extracted an apology from Washington, detained the crew for over a week, and held the plane for months before allowing the US military to retrieve it, dismantled and crated.

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